lkml.org 
[lkml]   [1999]   [Oct]   [3]   [last100]   RSS Feed
Views: [wrap][no wrap]   [headers]  [forward] 
 
Messages in this thread
/
Date
From
SubjectRe: cannot delete directory - why?
On Sun, Oct 03, 1999 at 03:39:44PM +0200, Guest section DW wrote:
> From bam@snoopy.apana.org.au Sun Oct 3 01:07:22 1999
>
> I exited the chroot environment and tried to remove the pts directory.
> This pts filesystem returned the error "file not found" - is this to
> be expected? This file not found error confused rm, which entered an
> infinite loop (perhaps I should file a bug report against rm?)
>
> The first is a kernel bug, the second an rm bug.
> Clearly, you already submitted a kernel bug report. I submitted a patch.
> It is a good idea also to submit an rm bug report.

I am now wondering if it *is* a bug in rm?

I think the behaviour of rm could be explained as follows (not that
I have seen the source code). rm gets a listing of the drectory. It
then tries to delete all the files within that directory. When it sees
the error "file not found", it gets confused - how could that file
not exist, when I only just got its entry? So it assumes that a race
condition exists, where another process may have deleted it, and
re-reads the directory, hence seeing the same file again.

Perhaps it should really have a limit of how many times it will rescan
the same directory?
--
Brian May <bam@snoopy.apana.org.au>

-
To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in
the body of a message to majordomo@vger.rutgers.edu
Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/

\
 
 \ /
  Last update: 2005-03-22 13:54    [W:0.028 / U:0.032 seconds]
©2003-2020 Jasper Spaans|hosted at Digital Ocean and TransIP|Read the blog|Advertise on this site